Ideas on improving the Business-IT alignment in BPM enabled by SOA

In recent years, Business Process Management (BPM) enabled by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) proved to be a successful in improving the Business-IT alignment. Today, BPM enabled by SOA requires transformation between process models. Primarily, because specifications used for designing business process models and executable business process models differ. Process model transformation expresses itself as the Business-IT gap reducing potential operational alignment of the business and IT. In this paper, we review and classify state-of-the-art solution for the operational Business-IT alignment in BPM enabled by SOA. For solutions classification, we define three distinct types of approaches: methodological, transformation and enhancement. We discuss each type characteristics and its main strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, for each type, we provide examples from literature and discuss them. Based on existing works strengths and weaknesses we give ideas for a new solution based on an enhancement approach. The proposed solution has potential to improve Business-IT alignment through simplification of the BPM enabled by SOA.

[1]  Mathias Weske,et al.  BPEL to BPMN: The Myth of a Straight-Forward Mapping , 2008, OTM Conferences.

[2]  Bernard Coulette,et al.  Broadening the Use of Process Patterns for Modeling Processes , 2007, SEKE.

[3]  Ying Chen,et al.  An Improved Visual BPEL-Based Environment for Scientific Workflow , 2008, 2008 Seventh International Conference on Grid and Cooperative Computing.

[4]  Guido Wirtz,et al.  Translating shared state based ebXML BPSS models to WS-BPEL , 2010, Int. J. Bus. Intell. Data Min..

[5]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Translating unstructured workflow processes to readable BPEL: Theory and implementation , 2008, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[6]  Maria-Eugenia Iacob,et al.  Feasibility of EPC to BPEL Model Transformations Based on Ontology and Patterns , 2009, Business Process Management Workshops.

[7]  Jana Koehler,et al.  Applying Patterns during Business Process Modeling , 2008, BPM.

[8]  W. M. P. V. D. Aalsta,et al.  YAWL : yet another workflow language , 2015 .

[9]  Frank Leymann,et al.  On Visualizing and Modelling BPEL with BPMN , 2009, 2009 Workshops at the Grid and Pervasive Computing Conference.

[10]  Matjaz B. Juric,et al.  WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g , 2010 .

[11]  Steffen Mazanek,et al.  Constructing a bidirectional transformation between BPMN and BPEL with a functional logic programming language , 2011, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[12]  Jerry N. Luftman.  Assessing Business-IT Alignment Maturity , 2000, Commun. Assoc. Inf. Syst..

[13]  Douglas C. Schmidt,et al.  Past, Present, and Future Trends in Software Patterns , 2007, IEEE Software.

[14]  Mark von Rosing,et al.  Business Process Model and Notation - BPMN , 2015, The Complete Business Process Handbook, Vol. I.

[15]  Jörg Dörr,et al.  How to better align BPM & SOA – Ideas on improving the transition between process design and deployment , 2008 .

[16]  Santhosh Kumaran,et al.  A model-driven transformation method , 2003, Seventh IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2003. Proceedings..

[17]  Matjaz B. Juric,et al.  WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with IBM WebSphere 7 , 2010 .

[18]  Li Zhang,et al.  Transformation of UML Activity Diagram to YAWL , 2010, I-ESA.

[19]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Patterns , 2004, Distributed and Parallel Databases.

[20]  Mathias Weske,et al.  Business Process Management: A Survey , 2003, Business Process Management.

[21]  Wil M.P. van der Aalst,et al.  YAWL: yet another workflow language , 2005, Inf. Syst..

[22]  Pingyu Jiang,et al.  A New Methodology for Modeling and Controlling Design Processes , 2009, DET.

[23]  Oliver Thomas,et al.  Using Process Models for the Design of Service-Oriented Architectures: Methodology and E-Commerce Case Study , 2008, Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008).

[24]  Jörg Becker,et al.  Configurative Process Modeling - Outlining an Approach to Increased Business Process Model Usability , 2004 .

[25]  Jan Hidders,et al.  Round-trip iterative business process modelling between BPA and BPMS tools , 2011, Bus. Process. Manag. J..

[26]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Translating BPMN to BPEL , 2006 .

[27]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Formalization and verification of event-driven process chains , 1999, Inf. Softw. Technol..